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According to newsfactor.com FCC Chief Says Comcast P2P Blocking Was Widespread. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin said Comcast blocked BitTorrent P2P traffic even at low-volume times. Martin said Comcast’s blocking was not “content-agnostic,” since Comcast has announced plans for “protocol-agnostic” management. If the FCC finds Comcast violated its Internet Policy Statement, it will act. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin lashed out at Comcast Tuesday in testimony before Congress, asserting that the cable company blocked peer-to-peer traffic widely, and that he doesn’t know when or even if the company will stop blocking P2P applications. Comcast used Products/Services from Sandvine Inc., or similar equipment, which provides a “relatively inexpensive, blunt means to reduce peer-to-peer traffic by blocking certain traffic completely,” Martin told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. “More modern equipment can be finely tuned to slow traffic to certain speeds based on various levels of congestion.”
The FCC has conducted two public hearings focused on Comcast’s blocking of file uploads over the peer-to-peer protocol BitTorrent. At a hearing earlier this month at Stanford University in California, Martin strongly suggested the commission would take action against Comcast.
If the FCC finds that Comcast violated the principles in the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement, “the commission stands ready to enforce this policy statement and protect consumers’ access to the Internet,” Martin said.
Martin contradicted several claims Comcast made in defense of its actions. “Contrary to some claims, it does not appear that cable-modem subscribers had the ability to do anything they wanted on the Internet,” he said. “Some users were not able to upload anything they wanted and were unable to fully use certain file-sharing software from peer-to-peer networks.”
In addition, Comcast’s blocking activities were clearly not “content-agnostic,” since Comcast has since announced plans to migrate to a “protocol-agnostic” method of network management, Martin said.
Perhaps most importantly, Martin said Comcast did not block traffic only at high-volume times, but blocked BitTorrent traffic even at low-volume times. “Based on the testimony we have received thus far, this equipment is typically deployed over a wider geographic or system area and would therefore have impacted numerous nodes within a system simultaneously,” he said.
“Moreover, the equipment apparently used does not appear to have the ability to know when an individual cable segment is congested. It appears that this equipment blocks the uploads of at least a large portion of subscribers in that part of the network, regardless of the actual levels of congestion at that particular time.”
As for Comcast’s commitment to switch over to the protocol-agnostic method of network management, Martin said, “They claim that they will deploy this new solution by the end of the year, but it is unclear whether they will be finished deploying their solution or just starting that migration. Indeed, the question is not when they will begin using a new approach, but if and when they are committing to stop using the old one.”
But network technology consultant George Ou, who was a panelist at both public hearings, thinks Martin’s conclusions were flawed. Martin based his testimony about blocking during low-volume times on the testimony of Robb Topolski, who experienced an incident with a TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) reset packet at 1:45 a.m., not at peak congestion hours. “You have no way of knowing whether that reset came from Comcast or the normal background noise,” Ou said.
TCP resets can occur from factors besides the ISP, Ou explained. For instance, “Even Verizon, which does not use any TCP resets, saw their customers experiencing 12 percent resets on 10-minute TCP sessions, which suggests the resets are coming from somewhere other than the ISP.”
By Richard Koman
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